How has George Osborne’s Budget gone down with his party? The Tory MPs I’ve spoken to in the past 24 hours or so since the Budget seem reasonably content with it. They’re not skipping through the corridors singing, but they’re equally not furious or despairing. Most seem to have sympathy with the lack of a rabbit in the Chancellor’s speech, even though they’re a bit disappointed that the Chancellor gave enough signals for them to think he was keeping a rabbit in his hat, only for a hamster to come scuttling out in the form of his Help to Buy ISAs.
One senior Tory backbencher says: ‘The judgement that he’s called has probably been right. It’s better to try to reassure people about competence and responsibility than to try to excite and the price of that is that there is nothing exciting.’ Another backbencher says it was ‘boring but competent. Unflashy. A giveaway would have seemed inauthentic’.
MPs fighting to hold marginal seats were keen for something that could shift the polls in their favour, but are not taking a game changer back with them to their constituencies this weekend. Some say they would have liked something a Those two things would be pushing the personal allowance up to £11,000 straight away, and a giveaway of shares in state-owned banks to taxpayers.
But MPs have decided that it is better to hold back for the manifesto, instead. One says: ‘He didn’t set out what he wanted to do on inheritance tax, so he is going to put this in the manifesto. So the party is waiting for that – and it can’t be worse than the last manifesto, so they should be happy with that.’
Cameron has ordered a re-draft of the manifesto as he wasn’t happy with it, and of course this is the document where the Tories will try to be visionary and enthuse voters about their brand. Osborne does seem to have done a good job on branding and language yesterday, with every MP I’ve spoken to praising the way he presented the Budget. One Cabinet minister said the Budget ‘gets us talking the same language as people… there was good stuff in there that puts us on the same page as aspirational voters.’
So what happens now? The Conservative party is approaching the date by which Lynton Crosby had told MPs he thought the polls would start moving in its favour, but nothing has happened yet. One MP says ‘there are no jitters, even though we are reaching the stage where Lynton was forecasting we would cross over in the polls’. Another senior figure says the Budget ‘takes us back to the assumption that there will be a stalemate between the two parties but that over the next few weeks voters will be taking a longer look at the parties and saying they [the Tories] are slightly better than the others and then we will get a slight lift’.
So the Budget may not have changed very much about the political debate or indeed about the Tory party’s standing in the polls at all. But as with the overall Conservative election campaign, that is the point: it is more important that the party do nothing to damage its reputation than it is to excite voters.
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